Hi there
I am Alexis from NOLAROADS France. We are exploring UA and have some questions.
sorry if the answer as been answered already but there seem to have Two definitions of retention in UA and the glossary
UA : New users playing exactly (1/7/30) days after their first session.
GLOSSARY Retention: the percentage of users who return over a specified period of time. Retention metrics measure the activity of users over time; industry standard retention rates are calculated based on 1-day, 7-day, and 30-day retention rates. Retention can tell you a lot about your game (ex: Are people enjoying it? Are there problems with certain devices? Are there problems with the design of the game?)
I guess that the one of the Glossary is the correct one but on the video of Dylan Jones he says it is the UA definition that is correct.
Can you please put some light here?
Thanks a lot
Alexis
@alexisdechabot ,
Yeah, I think the Glossary has a more general definition of retention. They aren’t really contradictory though. The “specified period of time” is more a reference to the possibility of measuring retention for 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, etc.
On the Unity Analytics dashboard, Day N Retention is calculated as follows:
New Users playing exactly N days after their first day / Total number of New Users exactly N day ago
Thanks a lot.
Then why is it more interesting to know how many players came back on specificly that day than for example at least once in that week. (for a seven day retention).
I mean if the player comes back on D6 or D8 you will not know it then right?
@alexisdechabot ,
That is correct and that should taken into consideration when analyzing your game’s retention data.
There is no universally agreed upon retention calculation, but Day N Retention is used throughout the industry. Since that is what game analysts expect, that is the metric we provide.
AppLift has a pretty good blog post about the different type of retention calculations:
http://www.applift.com/blog/user-retention
The one you are describing is basically Return Retention: “which proportion of users come back to the app at least once within N days.”
The difficulty there is that if a user comes back on Day 2 or 3 and then never again, they would still show up in Day 30 calculations, for example. That might be a misleading number to show developers.
However, there are always conversations going on about providing different retention metrics. You should consider adding a suggestion to our Feedback Request page:
https://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/unity/suggestions?category=analytics
We use the feedback from this page to determine what features developers are most interested in.
Ok thanks a lot for the info, it is clear now 